Theresa May’s Weak and Wobbly Outfit

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/13/opinion/theresa-may-brexit.html

Version 0 of 1.

The British, sleepwalking into what Will Hutton of The Guardian has called “a national act of self-harm on an epic scale,” have voted to be near ungovernable – a condition in which the enfeebled Prime Minister Theresa May claims she can offer “certainty,” but that in fact constitutes, as she has conceded, a “mess.”

The epic self-harm is, of course, Britain’s planned exit by 2019 from the European Union, the foundation of its prosperity and strategic heft over more than four decades. The self-inflicted mess stems from the prime minister’s humiliation in an election last week: call it May-hem. She is set to limp, vulnerable to the whims of her Conservative Party and to any crisis, into a rickety government propped up by a bunch of rabid Ulster Unionists who are the ideological heirs of the firebrand preacher, Ian Paisley.

An inept campaign saw May promising “strong and stable” government so often it became a joke. Britain, on the eve of a momentous negotiation that will define the lives of the youth who never wanted “Brexit,” now has the opposite: weak and wobbly government. This will mean that May has to compromise more; hence a softer departure from the Union, if there’s enough political coherence even for that. Those who cling, as I do, to the faint hope that Brexit will collapse under the weight of its folly have been given a fillip; this is not over.

May has been repudiated for her arrogance, but above all for her utter vacuity. Almost single-handedly she revived the Labour Party of the leftist Jeremy Corbyn, who at least appeared to believe in something.

May was for remaining in the Union before she was against it; at which point all she could say was “Brexit means Brexit.” This tautology, combined with May’s laughable fantasy of taking Britain “global” by exiting a single market of more than a half-billion people, summed up the nothingness of a decision informed by lies, fueled by jingoism, and spearheaded by charlatans.

The Conservative Party through a double own-goal – first the needless Brexit referendum and then May’s needless snap election – has delivered the country to polarization. The political center has evaporated. The extremes, and The Daily Mail, have won. Economic downturn, fueled by uncertainty, is almost sure to follow.

Together, Britain and the United States have succumbed to a strange delusion of restored greatness, symbolized by May’s embrace of Donald Trump. It is the allies’ un-finest hour. They have turned inward; they have turned nasty. Trump’s planned visit to Britain later this year, a sop to his vainglory that revealed British desperation at the loss of Europe, is on hold – because a sitting American president is that unpopular in London! To sabotage British goodwill toward America to this degree is something, even for Trump.

There is a vacuum where Anglo-American liberalism once stood: Angela Merkel’s Germany and Emmanuel Macron’s France have stepped up to face down Vladimir Putin and his ilk. The postwar order had a good run: 1945-2017.

Fintan O’Toole offered a good summary of Brexit in The New York Review of Books: “Strip away the post-imperial make-believe and the Little England nostalgia, and there’s almost nothing there, no clear sense of how a middling European country with little native industry can hope to thrive by cutting itself off from its biggest trading partner and most important political alliance.”

Still, it’s what the people, or at least a narrow majority, wanted. That has to be respected, unless the people change their mind.

May’s other mantra was, “No deal for Britain is better than a bad deal.” That’s off the table, unless Ireland along with British prosperity is to be sacrificed on the Brexit altar. The Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party, whose ten seats are now essential to May’s flimsy majority, are anti-abortion and anti-same-sex marriage, but even they are not so retrograde as to want a hard border with Ireland, an E.U. member, imposed as a result of a chaotic exit. Nor do they want the border controls that would accompany British withdrawal from the customs union. May’s D.U.P. dalliance does not come free.

The prime minister will also have to listen more to Conservatives, like Ken Clarke, who have opposed a hard Brexit. She will have to accept that the E.U. is going to exact a price for this decision: Britain cannot have its cake and eat it. If the country wants to remain in the single market, overwhelmingly in its interest, it will have to accept free movement of people, but then, as Hugo Dixon observed on Infacts.org, “Wouldn’t we be better off staying in the E.U., where we have lots of influence?”

Weak and wobbly means weak and wobbly. May could well fall within the next two years, possibly leading to another election. A parliament that is restive may reject any deal she does cobble together. Buyers’ regret was evident in the Labour surge. It is no longer wishful thinking to believe such regret could yet lead to a second referendum, based this time on real terms rather than wretched lies.